How can start-ups, big corporates, scientists and governmental organizations join hands to create a global impact?

#BrightMindsChallenge

How can start-ups, big corporates, scientists and governmental organizations join hands to create a global impact?

The UN SDG17 encourages the revitalizing and enhancing of international partnerships that bring together different actors and to mobilise all available resources in support of global sustainable development.

Hear from the Bright Minds Challenge partners as they share their experience, learning and inspiration from this successful coalition.

Andrea Warriner, Deputy Director of Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship

The first step to collaboration between start-ups and corporates is developing an understanding of the unique capabilities each group brings to the table. Start-ups are unrestrained by bureaucracy and process, so they are nimbler and more likely to innovate rapidly. On the other hand, corporations provide the global reach necessary for expanding effective solutions. Together, they can create more impact than either group could create alone. Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship

Danny Kennedy,Founder ofSungevity, MD of California Clean Energy Fund

Hard science is a team sport. That has been evident in all the major breakthroughs of the last century such as the Manhattan Project. As we turn our attention to the much better solutions on offer in the Bright Minds Challenge to the great challenge of providing power for all while slowing climate change, we have to collaborate at a higher level. Demonstrating that the likes of DSM, the public-sector science agencies and little start-ups can make something happen is critical to the audacious approach we need to make an impact. We need a thousand flowers and then some to bloom to make sure we have what it takes to achieve 100% clean energy for all. And the group effort represented in the Bright Minds Challenge is a great model for how to make that happen quickly, cleverly and with a sense of fun. Having done it at this scale we then need to take that experience into the world as a team - because the other reality is that the fruits of good, open science are technologies that it takes political savvy to have succeed. Not only is this a team game but a contact sport - and one in which we will have to work together to ensure that the products of our labours in BCM are accepted and adopted by the status quo. Sungevity

Emily Reichert, CEO of Greentown Labs

Large corporates play a critical role in allowing innovative technologies that address climate change and other world issues to truly have a positive global impact. Without the support from large corporates and the access to capital markets, start-ups can struggle to scale their technologies and therefore don’t always reach their full potential. Collaboration between these two groups only increases the possibility for global impact. It’s great to have DSM serve as a positive example for how start-ups and corporates can work together and help each other through a program like the Bright Minds Challenge. I am hopeful that other large corporates will follow their lead! Greentown Labs

Rob van Leen, ‎Chief Innovation Officer of DSM

The final crucial element in realizing the renewable energy transition is collaborative innovation. The renewable energy transition challenge cries for partnering and joining forces across the value chain, to be able to scale –up, to experiment and finding new ways to innovate. The complexity of the issues is too big for any one party to tackle alone and also radical (technology) innovation is not something you can do by yourself anymore. It requires new kind of partnerships between small and large companies and both public and private and complementary competences. It’s not for the fainthearted: crossing the valley of death together, it is about opening up and building upon each other. But very rewarding. DSM

Who holds the key to achieving the world’s transition to 100% renewable energy? Our partners discuss the need for cross-border and cross-sector collaboration and the impact it can have on reaching the UN SDGs faster.

The Bright Minds Challenge partners represent various sectors and unique expertise. We asked them to share their view on the key challenges for a global transition to 100% renewable energy and cutting the carbon off the grid.

Scientist Ernesto Julio Calvo (Argentina) who invented Inquimae - a new way of extracting lithium that is powered by solar energy and is quicker and cleaner than any existing technology - won the first prize in the Bright Minds Challenge.

Join a select group of leaders, pioneers, innovators, scientists and investors at Westergasfabriek - a former gas factory and now a 100% sustainable park - to get inspired, share your perspective, network with industry leaders, find new pathways to collaboration, and celebrate the Bright Minds Challenge!

The finalists are Cellulike (Tanzania) a pay as you go model for micro-grid solar power distribution systems, Inquimae (Argentina) a sustainable energy storage project from renewable energy sources (solar and wind) for remote electrification and Solar Ear (Brazil), focusing on solar powered hearing aids for the most impoverished communities across the globe.